YouPic: A Review…

Well, I can call this week to be a failure somewhat because I was not able to work with my camera, but I really have my excuses here; Eye appointment, fixes around the house, sleeping problems and lack of power and ideas (well, ideas are there but I'm procrastinating). And despite having 2 days of sick leave after my appointment, I didn't really invest much time into my camera. Hopefully I will do so soon and post whatever I can do here.
For this occasion and just not to keep this week without a blog post, I've decided to write a review, or more like a chain of thoughts about the website that I've recently "re-joined": YouPic. If you are reading this, bear in mind that this is just my thoughts and my observations and I'm not really aiming on pushing people into or away from the website, but it is simply my experience around it for the past 3 weeks or so since I've re-joined.

YouPic: A Review

I remember some years back when I joined YouPic, I've deleted my account after some weeks and I think the reason was, back then, that I didn't want myself to get involved so much into social media and waste time there instead of putting time and effort into my camera and real photography and away from "socializing." Now, however, I've re-joined because I've simply left Flickr and Instagram for good and this website did sound like a good substitution, for the time being. Anyway, now after some weeks of uploading photos there, I think I have to say that not everything I've encountered was positive. From my own perspective at least. To be fair, let me put that in a form of points to organize my thoughts, and classify them into Positives and Negatives.

Positives:

• Going around the website and reading the About section, the website is apparently established by a group of youth with great ambition (I think most of them are Swedes). Frankly, to deal with a website of that kind which is NOT based in the US like the bulk of the other "infamous" websites - that, for me, is a nice experiment that I'm willing to take away from the major stream.
• With paid membership (which I don't have still) one can establish a business through the website. I'm not sure yet how it works but seems there is a way to sell photos just like in stock websites, or maybe selling prints as well. Again, I didn't go through this experience because I don't have a paid membership, but the options are available and visible.
• The website has a system of "gaming" as I like to call it; Some sort of interactive awards (e.g. Award for traveling to 5 countries). I think it is dedicated who do like to achieve through challenges, and it is sort of fun to see the daily progress and the upgrade of levels and such.
• The website provides statistics for various aspects about your profile to track your progress and that is WITHOUT even having a paid membership (like the case with Flickr for example).
• Providing contemporary trending hashtags (as well as the typical aspects of social media, like messaging, commenting and sharing).
• The chance to "see" real photography with high resolution images as much as possible (unlike Instagram) and also providing categorization method for these photos (assigned by the uploader).
• It has an "Explore" section to find all about newly uploaded images or trending images and so on.
• Surfing through the website, I don't see much (if any) ads - Even though they advertise that with a paid membership, you will not see ads (with other benefits).

I think those are most of the points that occur to my mind right now about the positive side of YouPic. However, the negative, to me, is a bit of a killer on some sides, specially after encountering some incidents, which I will try to explain after listing the negatives.

Negatives:

• One major killer here is the pricing of memberships. The lowest membership type does actually cost, annually, more than Flickr's annual membership after their recent change in policies. Flickr's new policy caused some photographers (including me) to leave the platform for good as the annual membership is almost the double of what it was before. YouPic's annual membership does cost even more than that amount at about $60 for the Enthusiast membership; The lowest of the two options available.
• I'm not a fan of nudity but the website provides the users with the capability of tagging their images as "Adult Content" which does not view the image wherever you encounter it until you click few buttons. However, some people for some reason do not tag their nudity images and it shows clearly and directly making the website not suitable for some specific range of ages. Moreover, the admins of the website does not seem to track down these incidents efficiently as I can see it is such a common occurrence.
• Blocking a user is an available option (which I need to use actually). However, when blocking someone, you just block them from interacting with you only; You can still see their profile. I'm not sure if this is what most people want but for me, when I block someone, it means a block for good, in two directions.
• Starting first with the website, when I first started to upload, my images would get instant Likes and exposure. In time, the exposure did look quite limited and hard to get any and I'm not sure if this is related to the timing of upload.
• I started uploading my photos on some sort of a regular basis, twice or thrice a day, but then and out of sudden, I was shocked for the limitation of 12 hours time period between uploads because my account was Free type; Nothing was mentioned about the time limitation before in the process of registering.

I've mentioned above that there was some incidents which I might as well add to the negative side of things on YouPic, and maybe I'm starting to get a feeling that the website is trying to push me hard to get a membership in some hidden ways. Imaginations? Maybe, but this is how it feels right now.
When I started surfing the Explore section on YouPic (a nice leisure time activity actually that somewhat helps on inspiring me), I've noticed that some users that did upload ads as if it was Instagram. I did take it seriously and did report these posts and I got message from the admins thanking me for the help on keeping the community of YouPic clean. However, and strangely, after some time, I was not able to upload my photos. I've discovered later that I was able to upload through my laptop at work but not at home using my PC, and that meant that my IP address was on some kind of block list. I've contacted the admins over the course of some days to resolve the matter but nothing happened and the problem was not resolved. Finally, I'm now using a VPN service (free) just to upload my photos from home using my PC. In the course of this problem, I've received some messages from the admins offering me the membership and even with some discount using a special code as a promotion (estimating that, it was still higher than the annual fee for Flickr). This incident, now, pushed and pushes me to think that probably the problem with the sudden drop in exposure, and probably the uploading problem and maybe other downside matters might all be a "drive" to let new comers get involved with the website with paid memberships.

Please, don't get me wrong here with my suspicions. After all, they are just suspicions, but they felt and feel like true. The fact that I'm still unable to upload in a regular manner like before from home despite chatting with the admins and providing all the information they required is something that annoys me greatly despite the easiness of using a VPN, and for free.
The quite common posts of nudity (which I don't like to name as an art in the first place), which sometimes even gets down to the limit of being simply pornographic in nature and not quite related to the art of photography, and the incapability of tracking these photos effectively, makes the website not suitable for all ages (and for some people, not suitable for workplaces as well).
I think the website needs some rigid and effective push forward by changing some policies and methods used to manage the website BEFORE asking the users to purchase a membership with such prices. Thinking about it, Instagram would sound quite a suitable solution for photographers to spread and expose their images for free (despite its negatives) and with some good skills, any user on Instagram can turn his or her account into a base to start a business. For this reason, I don't think the prices of YouPic are justified still.

If you are reading this, I would advise you NOT to take my words for granted but to go out there and try the website yourself and make your own judgement about the website.